1) Europeans started building on old ideas, to create a superior model, and invented completely new machines. One example of an improvement was the deep-draft, round hulled sailing ships for the Atlantic. Which enabled the Europeans to carry heavy armaments. The compass (an instrument which was copied from the Arabs) helped pin point a ships location, and thus expedited sea travel. Explosives (invented by the Chinese) began to be harnesed by the West. The Europeans created the first primitive guns in the West, and slowly came up with more sophisticated gunnery.
2) Beginning explorations to the world by the West started with Henry the Navigator, who with his findings, unintentionally helped the Portuguese sailors to accomplish sailing around the Cape of Good Hope. After Henry the Navigator was the Portuguese sailor Vasco da Gama who was reached India in 1498. The sailors on this fleet returned with small loads of spices This opened up the spice trade. Even Later came Christopher Columbus who discovered "the new land". Countries used this new land to establish settlements and colonies. Including France and Britain.
3) The Colombian Exchange was a exchange that took place following Spanish establishment of colonies in New World where the people of Europe and Africa came to "The New World". It proved to be a problem, which would plague both peoples for many years there after. Animals, plants, and diseases of the two countries were passed along to peoples with weak immune systems. Thus the people were very susceptible to the diseases, of which 1 region thought as a cold, the other viewed as a plague that killed. The "indigenous" people of this region were the hardest hit they had the leas of an immune system of the two cultures, and thus their populations were devastated. The animals traded were beneficial to the Polynesians and Indians, they provided them with a new source of food that could carry them through times when the trading or agriculture was not good.